by Rufus King
Now, it appears that there is considerable mystery attached to Leucippus. It means nothing in my life, but as the subject directly pertains to Ramier’s adventure, it might be advisable to take a side-swipe at it.
One may concede with a fair amount of safety that Leucippus, the gentleman in question, was a Greek philosopher, born at Miletus or, if you prefer, Elea. It is essential that you make a choice, as even an historian can see the absurdity of having the same man born in two places at once. It may also, with safety, be conceded that Leucippus was the founder of the atomistic theory, and that he was a contemporary of Zeno, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras. I hope that for his sake they had, in those days, some system or other for nicknames.
It further appears that his fame was a smothered-up affair, owing to a generous over-shadowing of it by the subsequent prestige of Democritus. This latter gentleman—although his actions might well lead one to suspect that he was no gentleman—developed Leuc’s theory into a system. He did so in such a high-handed manner, furthermore, that Leuc’s very existence even was later denied by Epicurus and, in more modern times, by the skeptical Mr. E. Rohde. All this boils down to the fact that nothing definite seems to have been known of his life, and that even the poor youngster’s birthplace is uncertain.
This, of course, was before Ramier tuned-in the archaically-Greek-speaking voice.
I dare say that a good many historians and philosophers would be glad to have these obscure points cleared up but, unfortunately, I must refer them for this directly to Ramier Bellmy. Mr. Bellmy possesses a complete account of the sayings of the voice—an account of which I shall only incorporate a digest in this narration.
The voice that Ramier heard, by the way, belonged to none other than to one of Leucippus’s very best and most intimate friends.
“I wish that if you are Duveen you would stop talking Greek and talk English,” said Ramier, after he had recovered sufficiently from the shock of his success to continue with his strange conversation. “I can understand you reasonably well, but I’ve naturally grown a bit rusty since leaving college, and I’m no longer as proficient as I should be. Are you Duveen, and if so, how does it happen that you are able to talk Greek?”
This was hardly a complimentary question, especially to a future father-in-law, but Ramier was much too excited to worry over any little thing like that.
“I am not Duveen,” the voice answered, still in Greek—which I have had translated, for the benefit of any stray illiterate readers—“and I am purposely talking in Greek to prove it.”
“Then who are you?” continued Ramier tensely.
“Relax a bit, big boy. Put the brakes on the old blood pressure, or you’ll start collapsing all over again. My name is Thyrus. I am, or rather was—he has been dead, alas! a couple of thousand-odd years or so—the most intimate and dearly beloved friend of Leucippus. We were,” the voice trembled a little with an uncontrollable emotion, “pals.”
“Heavens!” muttered Ramier, clutching the edge of the table again.
“I don’t wonder at your being surprised,” went on the voice of Thyrus. “If I have convinced you by now that I am not Duveen, I’ll quit talking Greek and shift into English. You haven’t the faintest conception of how complete a study I’ve made of languages through the ages. I’ll give you some samples, if you like—repeat-the-same-sentence-in-different-tongues sort of thing, you know. Take, for instance, the usual tripe you find in language books, such as ‘Why has the white cat eaten the brown chop left by the careless cook on the round table?’ I shall place it first in the Hamitic family—having a personal penchant for Egyptians—and begin with the ancient Egyptian and more modern Coptic, carry it through the Libyan or Berber languages of northern Africa to the Ethiopic languages of eastern Africa. After that—”
“I wish you would—later,” said Ramier unsteadily, while large beads of perspiration dewed his brow. “But just for the present—with so much of importance to be done—I think if we just stick to English—”
The voice of Thyrus laughed pleasantly and continued in English:
“You mustn’t mind, old man, if you find me a bit wordy. I haven’t had the opportunity for conversing with a solid soul for, roughly, over twenty-four hundred years. It’s only natural that I should have a thing or two on my chest that I’d like to get off.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you, but you see—Drusilla—Duveen—” muttered Ramier brokenly.
“You needn’t worry about them,” said the voice of Thyrus sympathetically, “and you didn’t offend me in the least. Your friends are quite all right, and are rapidly getting accustomed to their new state. You would be speaking with Miss Duveen now, if you hadn’t by chance, caught my tune first.”
“They are safe! They are quite all right!” Ramier said to Billy and to Anna who were standing, tottering, near the table, and who were only able to hear Ramier’s part of the important conversation. “Drusilla and Duveen are safe!”
“Are you talking with them?” asked Billy.
“No—not yet—I am very much excited—I—”
“Then who on earth have you been gibbering at?”
“Thyrus.”
“Who?”
“One of Leucippus’s friends—a man named Thyrus.”
“Oh, gosh!” muttered Billy. “See here, old man, I’m afraid you’ve overdone it. Let me help you back to the cot, and we’ll get on the job again some time later this afternoon. Now, a good stiff shot of ice-cold lemonade—I’m sure there’s a lemon left about the place—”
“Nonsense!” said Ramier angrily. “I am quite sane and in my right senses. I have his voice tuned-in very well—enough so, in fact, to plug-in the loud speaker. You can convince yourself.”
Ramier pulled out the headphone plug and inserted in the jack the plug for an extremely delicate but powerful loud speaker of his own design and make.
“Do you mind saying a few words as a test?” he inquired of the empty air.
The voice of Thyrus at once came clear and strong from the cone of the loud speaker.
“My friends,” he said “—for you are all listening-in on me now—good afternoon. The first number o—”
“I knew it!” growled Billy. “It’s WEAF.”
“Hush!” hissed Ramier. “The wave length of the voice you hear is beyond the tune of human speech, as you very well ought to know if you don’t. Keep still and listen.”
“When interrupted by little sunburst over there,” continued the voice of Thyrus smoothly, “I was about to remark that the first number of questions you undoubtedly desire the answers to, deal exclusively with Miss and Mr. Duveen. Well, dear friends, they are standing at the moment by my side. In fact, the three of us are not more than ten feet away from you. Miss Duveen is directly in front of that small, square, ugly-looking table, beneath which is her suitcase. Mr. Duveen is upon her left, and I am standing upon her right. The three of us are facing you. Now, I shall be glad to give you as many proofs of my presence here in this room as you may desire. For instance, to prove that I can see you although you are unable to see me, let me point out to dear Mr. Preston that the buttons of the pajama coat that he is wearing are not in their proper holes. Just so. Now if I were not right here looking at you I would never be able to tell you that. It might further be well to call the attention of both of you to the fact that Miss Anna Piezinsjki has fainted.”
Pale, and all but fainting himself, Billy confirmed the misplacement of his buttons, and then looked around for Anna.
Ramier also looked for Anna.
There was no Anna.
Had she vanished, too?
She had not.
They would not have been so startled had they happened to hear her when she fell. Anna had systematically started out to overtake her mind in order to make it up for a faint from the earliest indication that Ramier had given of vocal contact with the spirit world. She had arrived at the faint coincidentally with the first remarks of the voice of Thyrus that had iss
ued from the loud speaker.
I dislike having to admit the fact, but I believe that both Ramier and Billy gave Anna the scantiest and most cavalier sort of treatment when they finally discovered her stretched out on the floor behind the table. They placed her on a cot and restored her with what, from its temerity, can be called no kinder name than the water route.
“That I should live to see this day!” she said wetly.
“Please try not to faint,” Ramier told her, with a sharpness one can readily excuse when considering the strain he was under. “We must concentrate exclusively upon this talk with Thyrus. The chance may not come again, as something or other may go wrong with the adjustment. Do not, I beg of you, distract us.”
“Why can’t Drusilla talk, as well as you?” Billy was asking of the spot where Thyrus, according to his own voice, was standing.
Billy was far from being satisfied. There was a catch in the business somewhere. Apart from the man’s wisecracks, there was an indefinable something about the silky quality of the mysterious voice that he did not quite like. He would have preferred one single word from Drusilla, or even from Duveen—regardless of what that word from Duveen might have been.
“You are unable to receive the waves of Miss Duveen’s voice, my dear Mr. Preston, because your side-kick has not, as yet, caught her tune, which is so much, so very much more lyrical than mine. Though I must admit my own was never classed exactly as a slouch in the outdoor amateur benefits we used to throw at Miletus for the local clubs.” The enigmatic voice of Thyrus continued placidly on and on. “I remember the positive sensation I created one day with a rousing little thing called the ‘Lay of Telegonus’ by that Eugammon person from Cyrene. It was a furor—what you now term a wow. I also used to knock ’em pretty cold with a couple of old Theocritus’s love songs in Æolic. But I wonder—you were wondering about not being able to hear Miss Duveen. I am very much afraid I shall not be able to help Mr. Bellmy catch her tune. You see, my own experiments, conducted several thousand years ago, carried me no farther than the stretching, and thus rendering invisible, of solid matter. Mr. Bellmy has advanced a step beyond me in this ability of his to materialize the invisible subject’s voice.”
Ramier, who had been listening intently, felt a sharp green dagger of professional jealousy stab him deeply.
“You!” he said. “Is it possible that this discovery is not my own—that I have simply reproduced something that has been done before?”
The voice of Thyrus laughed pleasantly. “Oh, my dear fellow,” he said, in a kindly fashion, “you mustn’t take it so to heart. Why even in my remotish day there was nothing new. Of course we thought so, and got quite heated up about our pet subjects when anyone tried to disprove its novelty, just as you people do today. But life—things—feelings—why, the world doesn’t change, old man. Everything recurs, that is all. I don’t want to boast, but I’ve been studying the matter as a spectator for a good many cycles, so that I know pretty well what I’m talking about. I do hope it won’t hurt your feelings when I tell you that the only absolutely new thing that modern civilization has given to the world is the spring bed.”
Ramier was much too annoyed to bother about spring beds. He clung tenaciously to incredulity. “Then you have already performed the same experiment that I conducted here yesterday morning?” he said.
“I did, and, I might furthermore mention with complete success. It was in the year that you now call 450 B.C. In fact, I made myself invisible with precisely the same type of wireless transmitter as the one there by your side. We were a hidebound sort of a crowd in our time, I can tell you! They thought I was either crazy or a liar. Of course, they respected me for both reasons, but they didn’t believe me. Even the boy friend, Leucippus, thought I was going just a bit too far when I attempted to convince him of the possibilities, both commercially and for pleasure, of radio.”
“What will—what will Marconi say to this?” muttered Ramier in a daze.
“Yes, we were taking a spin down to Corinth at the time I sprung it on Leuc. He accused me flat of having a cocktail too many at the last roadhouse we’d hopped off at, and of course I had. The poor kid sang a different tune though when he saw me dissolve before his eyes. He found out pretty conclusively he wasn’t so damn smart—I beg your pardon, Miss Duveen—so smart after all. He went on the water chariot for life. Speaking of water, Mr. Bellmy, you can well imagine with what interest I have followed you every move, ever since your little experiment at Bramwell University with the floating corks. I had rather imagined, until then, that I was doomed to remain in a state of invisibility forever.”
“Good heavens! You mean that I can solidify you, too—bring you back into a world where no human eye has seen you for over two thousand years?”
“Of course you can. I had the greatest hopes that Mayer, whose childish experiment with the corks you were reproducing, would do precisely that same little thing, but he failed to grasp the significant possibilities that you so cleverly—and so fortunately for me—saw.” The voice of Thyrus indulged in a tragically weary sigh. “You can take it from me, Mr. Bellmy, it was interesting enough to watch civilization play its comedy for the first century or two. It was swell, brother—swell! But the performance kept repeating itself. The costumes, languages, and manners of the actors changed, but the plot was always the same, as were the motivating impulses—love, hate, jealousy, greed. It grew desperately boring, and I seemed fated to have to watch it over and over again until all eternity. It was becoming more than I could stand. Believe me, friend, instead of the first, it’s the second thousand years that are the hardest. The worst of it is, you know, that I can’t even commit suicide.”
“Poor fellow!” murmured Ramier.
“Poor nothing!” muttered Billy to himself. As the voice of Thyrus had purred on and on, he had taken an ever-increasing dislike to its tone. The man was a villain at heart, Billy felt, no matter how hard he might try to tell them different.
“I looked forward to your experiment,” sang on the voice, “with an anxiety that fully equaled your own. After you should have made yourself invisible, I had hoped to meet you on, as it were, a distended-atomic footing. I badly needed companionship as—until the arrival of Miss and Mr. Duveen—I am the only person who seems to have existed in this dissolved state. You haven’t any idea how tired one can get of one’s self.
“Soup,” said Anna stolidly.
“What?” Ramier turned to her.
“Soup. It is ready for you.”
Anna pointed a finger to the clock, which marked a quarter of two. It was three quarters past their regular luncheon hour.
“Nonsense!” said Ramier impatiently. “Please stop bothering me. There isn’t any time for soup, or for anything else.”
“If you will pardon the suggestion, buddy,” broke in the voice of Thyrus smoothly, “Miss Piezinsjki is quite correct. Soup will be the best possible thing for you. The shock of hearing my voice, coming as it did on top of your recent illness, has been enough to unnerve you. Now, it is essential for the work cut out for you that your hand be as steady as a rock. Far be it from me to impress upon you the delicacy and caution that your touch will require. The soup will buck you up. Take a good swig of it and a quarter of an hour’s complete rest. To force you to do this, I shall not speak again before two o’clock. Until then, my friends, good-afternoon.”
As the voice died out, Billy again felt the unreasonable sensation that a faint, intangible note of mockery, or of something more sinister, was lurking in its refined modulations. It was still nothing definite that he could place a finger upon, but his instinct told him that it was there. Not only there, but dangerous.
CHAPTER XV
DURING THE COURSE OF WHICH THE DANGEROUS MR. WILKINS IS PREPARED FOR HIS JUST DESERTS
They ate Anna’s soup during a sweltering fifteen minutes. It was a good soup, thickened with flour for the purpose, as Anna explained to them, of making it adhere to the inside of their ribs.
> The haze that hung like a pall between the hot sun’s rays and the parched, shriveled earth grew increasingly more murkish and thick.
At five minutes to two, Ramier placed the lay figure on the spot where the flux of the waves propagated from his battery of transmitters would concentrate. He marked an outline with white chalk of where the feet of the lay figure rested upon the floor. Then he removed the dummy.
As the last stroke of the hour died within the heated stillness, the voice of Thyrus came at once from the loud speaker.
“I see that you are ready to begin,” it said.
“I am,” said Ramier. “Drusilla—I know that you can hear me, even though I cannot hear you—will you please stand directly on the space I have outlined with chalk?”
“Miss Duveen hears you perfectly,” said the quiet, suave voice of Thyrus. “She is crossing the room now to take her position. I shall tell you when she has arrived and is ready.”
There was a silence while a man, or a woman for the matter of that, could count ten.
“Miss Duveen is now ready,” said the voice of Thyrus.
“I shall explain aloud each move as I go along,” said Ramier. “You will follow me, please, and tell me if I am right. Check me, if I am wrong.”
“That will be best,” agreed the voice of Thyrus.
With the moment finally on hand for which they had waited so feverishly during the past terrible hours, Billy felt that he could hardly stand the strain. He thanked his stars that it was Ramier and not he who was at the helm. His own hands were shaking like the shriveled leaves that fluttered from the heat-baked trees.
Whether it was due to the jumpy condition of his nerves or to something more menacing and unexplainable, Billy did not know, but the feeling continued to persist and grow stronger that something was wrong—desperately wrong. It was something so wrong that if he failed in time to detect it an overwhelming catastrophe would fall upon them. If he could only define this suspicions in words…